Domestic Politics

Major political events in 2004 included a presidential election and a series of terrorist atrocities that provoked proposals for a sweeping consolidation of presidential power. In March, Vladimir Putin was elected to a second presidential term. The outcome of the election was never in doubt, since none of the other five candidates represented serious opposition. Putin won handsomely in the first round with more than 70% of the votes cast (compared with 53% in 2000). International observers praised the professionalism with which the election had been organized but criticized the state-controlled media for their pro-Putin bias. Such criticisms aside, no one doubted that the election outcome accurately reflected the will of the majority of the Russian population.

In a surprise move three weeks before the election, Putin sacked the entire government. He appointed as prime minister a little-known technocrat, Mikhail Fradkov, who was associated with no political party. Commentators explained the move in terms of Putin’s determination to conduct his second term in office standing on his own legs. Putin had come to power in 2000 as the anointed successor of Pres. Boris Yeltsin, and during his first term in office he had worked with members of the so-called Yeltsin “family,” notably the outgoing prime minister, Mikhail Kasyanov, and the head of the Presidential Administration, Aleksandr Voloshin. Now Putin was his own man and no longer owed his position to Yeltsin. The policies he began to implement in his second term indicated that he was indeed a very different leader from his predecessor.

Putin’s landslide victory put him in an extremely powerful position. The victory of the pro-presidential United Russia party in the December 2003 elections to the State Duma had already given his supporters a two-thirds majority in the lower house of the parliament and assured Putin of parliamentary approval for his legislative initiatives. Opposition parties were virtually eliminated. Liberals lamented the emasculation of the parliament and government and warned that while it might make it easier for the Kremlin to enact reforms, it would make it harder to ensure that the policies adopted were the right ones and, if they were not, to correct them after they had been adopted. The Kremlin’s tightening grip on power, these observers argued, was incompatible with political pluralism and mature democracy. Other commentators pointed the finger not at Putin’s centralizing policies but at the continuing weakness of civil society and the political indifference of the Russian population; in these circumstances, it was argued, strong central government was both inevitable and desirable. When Fradkov unveiled his new government, however, it turned out that many members of the former government had changed their titles but kept their jobs. In particular, the teams running the economic ministries and the security agencies remained in place. The stage was accordingly set for continuing clashes of opinion between liberal reformers, who advocated the lowest-possible level of state intervention in society and the economy, and the so-called siloviki (“men of power”), who favoured the reassertion of state control over the “commanding heights” of the economy.

In his annual address to the parliament on May 26, Putin laid out his priorities for his second term. These included consolidating the political stability established during his first four-year term and boosting economic growth to ensure that all members of the population would begin to benefit. Putin called on the government to raise the living standards of the poorest sections of society, modernize education and health care, create an affordable housing market, and establish an effective mortgage-finance system. Putin spoke of the importance of democracy but at the same time accused human rights groups that had been critical of his record of “receiving funding from influential foreign and domestic foundations” and “serving dubious groups and commercial interests.”

Human rights activists and liberal journalists were particularly critical of what they saw as the Kremlin’s efforts to control the mass media, which led during the summer to the cancellation of Russian TV’s last live discussion program. Following a terrorist attack on a Russian school in September, the editor of one of Russia’s leading newspapers was forced to resign on the grounds that his paper had published information that could have aided the terrorists. In another blow to media freedom—though there was no suggestion of Kremlin involvement in this event—Paul Klebnikov, editor of the Russian edition of Forbes magazine, was gunned down in Moscow in July; Klebnikov was the first Western journalist to have been killed in Russia since 1996.

There was no letup in the separatist conflict in the North Caucasus republic of Chechnya. Moscow continued its policy of “Chechenization”—that is, the gradual transfer of responsibility for public administration to Moscow-approved members of the Chechen community. February saw the assassination in Qatar of exiled Chechen separatist Zelimkhan Yanderbiyev; two Russian intelligence officers were tried and sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder. In May, Chechnya’s pro-Moscow president, Akhmad Kadyrov, was assassinated by a bomb in the republic’s capital, Grozny. An election for a new president was held on August 29 and was won by a landslide by Moscow’s preferred candidate, former interior minister Alu Alkhanov.

The summer saw an escalation of terrorist attacks on Russian targets. In each case Chechen separatists claimed responsibility. These included the nearly simultaneous midair explosions in August of two Russian commercial aircraft that killed all 90 people aboard, an August suicide bombing outside a Moscow subway station, and in September a siege at a provincial school in Beslan, North Ossetia, in which over 1,000 people were held hostage and more than 330 died, nearly half of them children. The scale of the violence at Beslan, and, in particular, the fact that the terrorists deliberately targeted young children, traumatized public opinion and horrified the outside world. The failure of the law-enforcement agencies to prevent these atrocities shook public confidence, and there was even some muted criticism of Putin himself.

In September, following the Beslan massacre, Putin proposed a set of measures that would, he said, strengthen the Russian state against the terrorist threat. These included a proposal that regional governors no longer be popularly elected but instead be appointed by the president, subject to endorsement by regional legislatures, which the president would be empowered to dissolve if they rejected his nominations on two occasions. The legislation, which was approved by overwhelming majorities in both houses of the parliament, returned Russia to the unitary system of government that had existed prior to the collapse of the U.S.S.R. in 1991. It was therefore seen as a sign that Putin was abandoning the attempts made by Yeltsin to turn Russia into a federation in substance as well as in name. Putin also proposed that candidates standing on party lists only, and not independents, in the future be allowed to run for the parliament. These proposals were met with dismay by many both inside and outside Russia. Liberals warned that they would remove the last checks on presidential power, that Russia was too large and ethnically diverse to be ruled from a single centre, and that in a country where parties were weakly developed, confining elections to party lists could weaken democracy.

In July 17-year-old Mariya Sharapova became the first Russian woman to win the singles All-England (Wimbledon) tennis championships, while in September 19-year-old Svetlana Kuznetsova became the first Russian tennis player to win the U.S. Open women’s championship.

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